We hate answering questions with 'well, it depends..." but on this occasion...
There are so many factors to take into consideration when developing a new website. It's really difficult to say without knowing what the full project entails. We've had new sites up and running within two to three weeks, but others that have been a six to nine-month project.
Here are some of the factors that may affect the time it takes to complete your website build.
- Website Functionality - Have you already documented what you need the website to do, or do you need to explore this further? Simple brochure-style sites need minimal scoping, but sites with more features need more planning and time in the development stage.
- Design - A fully bespoke custom design needs a designer to produce the concept, wireframes, and design of each page template. The more templates there are, the more design time required. Whereas using an off-the-shelf theme may be a quicker option, but not give you the level of adaptability that you need.
- Complexity - Linked with the first point, the website may be a simple, straightforward site, where it is just displaying information, but it may also be a fully interactive site, with lots of tools and options that require more back end and front end development time.
- Revisions - One way to reduce the design and development time is to ensure that the expectations and specifications are documented fully. This takes a little bit of time up-front but will reduce the number of revisions needed at the design approval stage. We'll also reduce this further by having regular sign-off points before progressing the project to the next stage.
- Content - Have you already prepared the content that you want on the site? It's important to understand the difference between content and function: The site can be fully functioning, but without the content in place, it's not going to be ready to launch.
- Your availability and internal approval process - How quickly will you and your team be able to turn around approval or amendment requests? Likewise, it's important to understand your own internal approval process as you may approve a design, for example, and we start the development work, but then if a manager asks for further changes, this means we've got to start again and will incur extra time and costs.
To sum up, if you're planning a new website build, talk to us about the full expectations of the site. The more we know, the more accurate we can be about providing a quotation and time estimate.